Brocade® (Nasdaq: BRCD) today announced that it was selected as a provider of Fibre Channel connectivity for the Microsoft SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse and the project code-named “Madison”— which are reference architectures for data warehousing based on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise. These solutions will help customers reduce costs, save time, and reduce risk with reliable, pretested hardware configurations and best practices for data warehousing applications.

Microsoft chose the Brocade 5100 and Brocade 300 storage networking switches to serve as a foundation for connecting Microsoft SQL Server databases and storage devices within the SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse reference architecture. This solution helps enable customers to access and share data within a data warehouse in a high-performance, manageable, and scalable manner — providing customers with server and storage guidance for various data warehouse workloads.

The Brocade storage networking solutions were also selected to provide an option for Fibre Channel connectivity with “Madison.” Madison is a highly scalable data warehouse appliance that helps deliver high performance at low cost through a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture. Brocade and Microsoft worked together to develop a carefully balanced configuration with tight specifications and testing to help enable cost-effective scalability with predictable performance.

“Brocade assists in delivering the reliability, intelligence, and performance required to meet and exceed data warehousing application needs for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 customers,” said Claude Lorenson, director of SQL Server marketing at Microsoft Corp. “SQL Server, with the help of Brocade, is able to help reduce networking management costs and improve productivity by providing centralized visibility and control.”

“Brocade and Microsoft have a long history of working together to network applications within the data center,” said Marc Randall, senior vice president of Products and Offerings at Brocade. “The inclusion of Brocade technology within Microsoft data warehousing reference architectures will help our joint customers reduce costs and risk by using industry standards-based, reliable, and pretested SAN hardware for their mission-critical data warehousing projects.”

These Microsoft data warehouse architectures will be sold by leading OEM and channel partners as qualified by Microsoft. To learn more, please visit www.microsoft.com/fasttrack and www.microsoft.com/madison. Technology partners will also be showcasing these offerings at the PASS Summit, taking place November 2 to 5 in Seattle, Washington.